Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10709

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Publication type: news

Cresswell A.
$4m shot in the arm for alternatives
The Australian 2007 Jun 23
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21951066-23289,00.html

Full text:

ONE of the biggest discrepancies in modern healthcare – that herbal and other alternative treatments have little of the formal scientific evidence demanded of prescription drugs – will be tackled after the federal Government announced a $4 million grant to establish a new National Institute for Complementary Medicine.

The new institute, to be based at the Campbelltown campus of the University of Western Sydney, will work out the priorities for future research projects looking at so-called natural therapies, which are thought to be soaring in popularity in Australia. Announcing the grant last week, federal health minister Tony Abbott said Australians now spent about $1 billion each year on complementary and alternative medicines, such as vitamins, homeopathic medicines and traditional Asian medicines.
Two in three Australians are estimated to use some form of complementary medicine or treatment each year, including vitamins, herbal treatments, mineral supplements and other therapies.

The $4 million grant comes on top of the $5 million the federal Government announced late last year it would give the National Health and Medical Research Council for specific research projects in complementary medicine.

News of the latest grant has been welcomed by other complementary medicine experts. Professor Marc Cohen, president of the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association which promotes the use of proven complementary medicines in mainstream medical practice, said the new institute “promises to provide research outcomes directly relevant to many National Health Priority areas, as well as increase Australia’s capacity to contribute to the world’s knowledge of many widely used medicines’‘.

“While the majority of the Australian community regularly use some form of complementary medicine, to date there has been a severe lack of funding supporting high quality research in this area, and much of this use is not guided by scientific research,’‘ Professor Cohen said.

Interim director of the new institute is Professor Alan Bensoussan, currently director of the UWS CompleMED Research Centre, who played a central role in setting up the NICM. Professor Bensoussan told Weekend Health that there were “a huge number ofareas” for the institute to look at, but that initially it would divide its work into four key steps. The first of these would be working out the most pressing priorities for research, to ensure limited funds were not being dissipated by duplicated effort.

“We have a large number of relatively strong but disconnected researchers across the country that compete for the small funding available,’‘ Professor Bensoussan said. “We need to identify national priorities in this area, where we think the opportunities exist, and to co-ordinate research.

“We hope by the end of this year we will have determined the kinds of priorities where the best investments can be made.’‘

The second key step for the NICM would be to increase collaboration and networks between different research centres and individuals, and links with researchers in the traditional medical fields. The other steps would be to increase and nurture the pool of expertise in the complementary medicine field, and finally – once results start flowing through – to disseminate research findings to health professionals and the community.

Professor Bensoussan said that Chinese public hospitals routinely used a large number of herbal medicines to treat patients, even for serious illnesses such as cancers, liver disease and kidney disease.

The herbal treatment artemisia – which has been developed into powerful anti-malarial treatments – was just one example of successful alternative treatments.

“What we need to do is get a handle on some of these forms of medicine that are available overseas, and look closely at building up evidence around these medicines to see whether they can be used in our own population,’‘ he said.

“There are indigenous medicines available all around the world, and what we need to do is look at some of the claims around these medicines, so we can see how they might be incorporated into conventional healthcare.

“For some of these medicines, the evidence will stack up, but for others it won’t.’‘

The UWS CompleMED Research Centre already has a herbal analysis laboratory, and will soon have a herbal pharmacology laboratory which together can identify compounds in herbal medicines and test their effects.

Just this week CompleMED announced a trial to test if the Chinese herbal formula Jiangtang Xiaozhi is an effective treatment for pre-diabetes, the reduced tolerance of or ability to metabolise sugar in the blood. Although pre-diabetes can exist undetected for years, and by the time it progresses to type 2 diabetes, about 50 per cent of patients will already have tissue damage.